A Man of Parts (12 page)

‘Has she?’

‘And Mrs Wells is at the shop in Regent Street.’

‘Yes, I know. It’s her day for that.’

They looked at each other with the consciousness that they were alone in the house together.

‘So what are you doing with yourself ?’ he asked.

‘Mrs Wells left me some work, but I’ve finished it,’ she said, and added cheekily: ‘What are
you
doing?’

‘Marking students’ essays,’ he said.

‘Can I see?’ Without waiting for permission she came across to the desk where he was sitting and looked over his shoulder at the essay he was correcting in red ink. She read the title aloud, ‘
The Fertilization of Flowering Plants
,’ and giggled. ‘All about the birds and the bees, is it?’

‘Something like that,’ he said, looking up at her from his chair with a smile.

‘I think human beings have more fun,’ she said.

‘How do you know?’

‘You’d be surprised.’

There was a long pause while they looked into each other’s eyes, trying to read each other’s thoughts and intentions. ‘You know, I don’t think I would be surprised,’ he said. Suddenly he took her hand, pulled her down on his knee and kissed her on the lips. She responded warmly.

‘I think that’s what you came in here for,’ he said. ‘Am I right?’

‘I’ve always fancied you,’ she said, ‘ever since the first day I came here. Couldn’t you tell?’

‘I have noticed, lately,’ he said. ‘And I must say I fancy
you
, Ethel. What shall we do about it?’

She put her mouth to his ear and whispered, ‘Whatever you like.’

He took out his pocket watch and looked calculatingly at it. ‘It’s a quarter-past three,’ he said. ‘When did Aunt Mary go out?’

‘Two o’clock. She won’t get back till four, earliest, because she likes to have tea out. And Mrs Wells is never back before half-past four.’

‘You seem to have it all worked out,’ he said, smiling. ‘Shall we move over to the couch?’ His heart was beating fast with excitement.

‘You will be careful, won’t you?’ she said, as he led her over to the ottoman couch where he would occasionally read or rest. ‘I don’t want to get into trouble.’

‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I’ll use something.’

‘Oh, good,’ she said.

He went to the locked drawer in his desk where he kept a supply of French letters, and when he turned round she had taken off her skirt, petticoat and stays, and was draping them carefully over a chair. The sight of her standing there, demurely bloused from the waist up, wantonly déshabillé below, inflamed him further and he knelt to pull down her drawers and bury his face in her belly. She laughed as he did so – laughed! Isabel never laughed when he made love to her; nor, for that matter, did she speak or move. This girl raised her hips to meet his thrusts and cried aloud, ‘Oh! Lovely lovely lovely!’ as she reached the climax of her pleasure, doubling his own.

They did not undress completely, in case Isabel or her mother should return earlier than expected and they had hastily to dress again. But otherwise it was a kind of sex he had always dreamed of without knowing whether it existed: not the solemn rapture of the nuptial bower – that was a different dream – but sex as release and recreation, with an eager partner, without shame, without guilt, and without any commitment. No vows, promises, formulaic declarations of love, to justify the act, because it needed no such validation. They had just finished putting their clothes back on when they heard the front door of the house slam shut behind Aunt Mary. He raised his finger to his lips and Ethel slipped out of the room, pausing only to blow him a kiss at the door. He heard her going downstairs, greeting Aunt Mary and saying she was just about to put the kettle on for a cup of tea. What a cool little minx!

When he retired to bed that night, lying beside the sleeping Isabel before falling asleep himself, he wondered drowsily if there had been some veiled, allusive talk about sex and marriage between the two women – if, say, Isabel had referred obliquely to his being ‘
very demanding that way
’, from which Ethel had inferred that he might welcome a more enthusiastic partner and thus been emboldened to enter his study that afternoon. Whatever the explanation, he gave thanks to Venus Urania for the visitation, and slept well that night.

He had hopes of renewing the experience, but – whether by chance or because of some suspicion of Isabel’s or Aunt Mary’s – Ethel and he were never left alone in the house again before her apprenticeship was concluded a month or so later. It remained a bright episode in his memory, and an incentive to look for other opportunities of the same kind. There would be many in due course, but for the time being he was weighed down with family worries and responsibilities. His mother, who had become seriously deaf and increasingly incompetent as housekeeper at Up Park, was dismissed from her position with a sum of £100 by way of compensation, and reluctantly joined her husband in the cottage he had rented for his father near Up Park when the Atlas House shop went bankrupt. His two brothers had also run into difficulties in their careers and required his assistance. He was soon spending a third of his income on his family.

More and more he felt oppressed by the role that circumstances and the expectations of his relatives were imposing on him: the role of the breadwinner, the hard-working husband, the dutiful son and brother, working every hour God gave him, travelling up and down the District Line between Wandsworth and Charing Cross in carriages packed with similarly harried and oppressed married men, hurrying along the crowded pavements of the Strand and Kingsway to the headquarters of the University Correspondence College in Red Lion Square, writing letters, marking exercises, teaching classes in biology, and then back again on the train in the evening, still working with papers balanced on his knees if he was lucky enough to get a seat, and retiring after dinner to his study to work on a biology textbook from which he had hopes of earning enough to relieve the anxiety of meeting all his financial obligations. When he went to bed at last, tired but tense, needing the release of sex to relax his body and clear his mind, Isabel was usually asleep; and if she was not, or he woke her up with an importunate embrace, she did no more than passively submit, cautioning him not to make a noise in case her mother in her bedroom on the other side of the landing should hear, because she was a light sleeper.

The erotic disappointment of his marriage was all the more bitter because, gripped by his pent desire for Isabel during their long courtship, he had omitted to notice that she was uninterested in or positively hostile to the ideas that absorbed him, like scientific education, or social and economic reform, and the various schools of socialist thought dedicated to this aim. She was incorrigibly conventional in her values and ambitions. She wanted only a modestly comfortable, impeccably respectable style of life, with a nice house, nice furniture and nice clothes. ‘Nice’ was her favourite adjective of approbation. And she was nice herself as everybody agreed, including himself. She was gentle, kind, loyal, unselfish. But he realised with dread that they were totally incompatible in body and soul. What on earth had possessed them to marry? It was all the fault of the social system, which put its oppressive weight behind an outmoded morality based on archaic religious dogma, preventing young people from exploring their sexuality freely with each other before they made any permanent commitment.

In this mood he was susceptible to the admiration of his female students at the College in Red Lion Square, and of one in particular who joined his practical biology class in the autumn term of 1892. Her name on the register was Amy Catherine Robbins, but she called herself ‘Catherine’ to her friends, and to him of course she was ‘Miss Robbins’. She was extremely pretty, not unlike Isabel in looks, but with lighter coloured hair, and more delicate and fragile in build. Her family background was several notches up the social scale from himself and Isabel – middle-middle rather than lower-middle class – and she had had better schooling. When she joined his course she was wearing black in mourning for the recent death of her father, who had evidently left his wife and daughter in straitened circumstances, and it was her intention to support herself and her mother by qualifying as a teacher, which invested her with a certain pathos and heroism in his eyes. He was also taken with her looks, which the black clothes rather enhanced than otherwise, and impressed by her sharp mind and fluent speech.

Miss Robbins lived with her mother in Putney, not far from Wandsworth, so she often walked down to Charing Cross station with him after his class to catch a District Line train. One day he suggested they might pause for a cup of tea at the Aerated Bread Company’s teashop in the Strand, and without a second’s hesitation she agreed. These teashops were a relatively new and very welcome amenity: clean, decorous establishments where a man might chat to an unchaperoned young woman without any embarrassment to either party. He learned on this occasion that her father had been killed in an accident on the railway line near Putney.

‘It’s not clear what happened – he was found beside the line, apparently hit by a train,’ Catherine said. ‘He may have been trying to cross it, because he often walked in the woods nearby. The coroner’s verdict was accidental death, but of course one can’t help wondering if it wasn’t an accident, especially as his business affairs were in such a bad state. But I don’t breathe a word of that kind to Mother – or to anyone else.’

Except her tutor, it seemed. He felt moved to share a similar confidence. ‘I sometimes wonder if my father didn’t try to take his own life,’ he said, and described the rather improbable accident which had caused Joseph Wells to break his leg, falling off a ladder resting precariously on a bench in the yard of Atlas House, allegedly in an effort to trim a vine on the back wall of the building – an uncharacteristically foolish thing for him to attempt. ‘If he didn’t actually intend to take his life, I think he was wilfully careless – didn’t care whether he lived or died. He was not a success as a shopkeeper, and he was past his prime as a cricketer.’ It struck him that he had never confided this thought to anyone before. There was something in this young woman’s attentive, clear-eyed gaze that inspired trust and drew confidences.

A pause for refreshment and conversation with Miss Robbins at the ABC teashop on the way home became a regular occurrence, and he soon discovered that she was interested not only in science but also, like himself, in modern literature and radical ideas. She had read the plays of Ibsen and ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’ by Oscar Wilde. She aspired to be a New Woman, in the currently fashionable phrase, and believed passionately in the rights of women to higher education, to the vote, and to ride bicycles in bloomers. When he advocated a state endowment for motherhood which would make wives financially independent of their husbands, subtly implying that it was an original idea of his own rather than Tom Paine’s, she almost swooned in admiration. She professed to be a freethinker as regards religion, and approved Free Love in principle – the principle that the union of a man and a woman who sincerely loved each other should not be obstructed or regulated by the state or a church. He was conscious that he was something of a ‘crush’ for her, and that there was an element of risk in the closeness of their association but, dissatisfied as he was with his domestic life, he thought he was entitled to enjoy the harmless adoration of a pretty and intelligent pupil, and he regarded their tête-à-têtes in the ABC teashop as little oases of civilised leisure in a desert of dutiful toil.

The toil, however, took its usual toll. In the middle of May, hurrying home – alone on this occasion – to Charing Cross, he started a cough that ended with his bringing up blood in the gentlemen’s lavatory beneath the concourse of the mainline station. He managed to get home, but collapsed and took to his bed. The doctor was called and prescribed opium pills and ice-bags on the chest. Isabel conveyed a message to the College that he would have to cancel his classes for the remainder of the academic year; privately he knew he would have to give up teaching for good, and try to earn his living as a writer in future. Miss Robbins called at the house a few days later to enquire anxiously about his health. Isabel was out and Aunt Mary conveyed the student’s good wishes to the invalid in his bedroom. ‘The young lady seemed very concerned,’ she remarked. ‘Yes, well, it’s fellow feeling,’ he said. ‘She is thought to be consumptive herself.’ ‘Is she, poor thing, what a shame,’ Aunt Mary sighed. ‘Such a pretty girl.’ He thanked Miss Robbins by letter, illustrated with a comic drawing of himself sitting up in bed in his nightshirt, looking miserable and dishevelled, and invited her to call again in a week’s time, when his wife would be at home and he might be able to venture downstairs and talk to a visitor. Occasional visits and correspondence continued throughout his convalescence and afterwards.

Isabel could see that the girl worshipped him, but she did not seem to feel threatened, and indeed made something of a joke of it. He thought he understood the reasons for her composure. Miss Robbins was very young for one thing, and delicate in health for another. There was not a hint of coquetry in her manner when she was with him and she was always very respectful to Isabel and her mother. He knew he was not the easiest person to look after when he was ill, so a regular visitor who could distract him with college gossip and intellectual conversation was very welcome to his womenfolk. He was advised, however, to move further out of London for the sake of his health, and in August he leased a mock-Tudor house in Sutton, where one could breathe air that blew unpolluted off the North Downs. This new location was some distance from Putney, and Catherine’s visits became less frequent, especially after the new academic year began. Isabel remarked on this one day with a certain complacency, adding, ‘I expect she’s found herself a nice young man.’ ‘Oh, I don’t think so,’ he replied – then added quickly: ‘Well, you may be right. But she’s a very serious student – her mind is focused on getting her degree.’ In fact, he was quite certain that Catherine had not found herself a young man because, unknown to Isabel, he was still seeing a good deal of her himself, in London.